LibrePlanet Conference 2009!

Our annual meeting has now officially morphed into the
LibrePlanet event. The date is set. March 21st and 22nd -- that's
right, two whole days! LibrePlanet will be at the Harvard Science
Center in Cambridge, MA -- right in Harvard Square on the MBTA's red
line.

LibrePlanet will cover a range of free software activism topics, with
an Open Space style effort to make progress on engineering for Free
Network Services and the High Priority Software Projects.

FSF files suit against Cisco for GPL violations

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced that it has filed a
copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco. The FSF's complaint
alleges that in the course of distributing various products under
the Linksys brand, Cisco has violated the licenses of many programs
on which the FSF holds copyright, including GCC, binutils, and the
GNU C Library. In doing so, Cisco has denied its users their right
to share and modify the software.

"Our licenses are designed to ensure that everyone who uses the
software can change it," said Richard Stallman, president and founder
of the FSF. "In order to exercise that right, people need the source
code, and that's why our licenses require distributors to provide
it. We are enforcing our licenses to protect the rights that everyone
should have with all software: to use it, share it, and modify it as
they see fit."

BadVista: We hardly knew ye

"The fact that Microsoft has repeatedly extended XP cutoff deadlines
and is releasing a public beta of Windows 7 today is proof of Vista's
failure"

On December 15, 2006, the FSF launched its BadVista.org campaign to
advocate for the freedom of computer users, opposing adoption of
Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free -- as in freedom --
software alternatives. Two years later, the campaign has 7,000
registered activists, the name Vista is synonymous in the public eye
with failure, and we are declaring victory.

GCC libraries get updated license exception

A new license exception will allow the entire GCC codebase to be
upgraded to GPLv3, and enable the development of a plugin framework
for GCC. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), together with the GCC
Steering Committee and the Software Freedom Law Center, has announced
the release of a new GCC Runtime Library Exception.

The new exception is built on top of GPLv3, so the libraries can be
upgraded to the latest version of the license. It also paves the way
for GCC to add a plugin architecture, by adding new protections
against extending GCC with proprietary software.

The text of the exception is available. The FSF has also published a
rationale document and FAQ to help users understand the exception
better.

An open response to Chris Frey regarding GFDL 1.3

Dear Mr. Frey,

Your letter about our recent change to the GFDL, which lets operators
of some GFDL-covered wiki sites relicense their contents under
Creative Commons BY-SA license, raises the important questions of
whether this change and the way we made it were proper, and what they
imply in regard to trusting the FSF's stewardship of our licenses in
the future.

Updating the Free Software Definition

Recently, we made some changes to the Free Software Definition to help
clarify a few points that had been confusing for people in the
past.

Because this definition is the benchmark we use to decide whether or
not a license is free, we want it to be as easy as possible for people
to understand, and over the years we've regularly made changes to the
text that do that.

In order to help people understand the purpose of these changes, we
also added a History section to the document, with a brief summary of
every substantial change made since 2001.

More background about the Cisco case

Back in 2003, we learned that the Linksys WRT54G, a popular wireless
router, used a GNU/Linux system in its firmware, but customers weren't
receiving all the source code they were entitled to under our
licenses. You might remember that case--a lot of developers were
interested in it and it was discussed in several different forums.

Despite our best efforts, Cisco seems unwilling to take the steps that
are necessary to come into compliance and stay in compliance. We asked
them to notify customers about previous violations and inform them
about how they can now obtain complete source code; they have refused
to do this, along with the other reasonable demands we have made to
consider this case settled.

3D graphics are 100% free software

A few months ago, SGI released a new version of the SGI Free License
B. With that change, a lot of code used to provide 3D graphics on
GNU/Linux systems was now free software. To make sure that all the
code was free software, however, a few developers who worked on code
released under a related license, the GLX Public License, needed to
grant us permission to release their work under the new terms.

Last month, we got great news from the X.org project that they've
obtained that permission from all the necessary developers. With that
done, all of the code for 3D graphics originally released under one of
SGI's licenses is now free software. Pretty soon you'll see this code
in free system distributions like gNewSense.

Freedom Walk: A walk to claim, ensure and preserve freedom

Free software had remained a technological and an economic issue in
the state of Kerala and it had been very successful in being so. A
team of four people decided to take the fundamental principle of the
freedom behind free software and take this message of freedom to the
masses in Kerala. They decided to project free software as an
empowering agent to change the lives of people and in solving social,
environmental and technological issues. They wanted to take free
software and the freedom behind it to the common man in Kerala.

New FSF microblogging communities

Several of us at the FSF have been using and enjoying the free
software "microblogging" service identi.ca. Users of the service swap
short messages, conveniently using either the web interface, text
messaging, or Jabber/XMPP.

identi.ca distributes the source code used to power the site under the
Affero GNU General Public License, and is following the free network
service principles that the autonomo.us working group has been
developing.

PlayOgg: Theora 1.0 is released!

The Xiph.org Foundation has announced the release of Theora 1.0. As a
patent- and royalty-free video codec, Theora is an excellent choice
for artists, producers and developers who want to help make a world in
which everyone can safely and easily use free software. Theora has
been standardized since 2004 but this mature and stable release is an
important milestone.

Upcoming releases of Mozilla Firefox will support Theora natively with
the new HTML5 video tag, which means that all of the other free
software web browsers derived from the Firefox code base, like
Iceweasel and GNU IceCat, will be able to do the same.

Congratulations to Xiph.org on the release! It's great to see it
getting easier and easier for people to Play Ogg.

35 days against DRM

Starting on Black Friday and over the following 35 days leading up to
the end of 2008, we asked for your help in promoting a consumer
boycott of Digital Restrictions Management.

Each day we be published your stories -- about a product, company,
service, executive or politician that has has inflicted the nightmare
of Digital Restrictions Management on you and our society, reminding
us all why this holiday season we needed an all-out boycott.

Apple iTunes goes DRM-free on music

As you've no doubt heard, Apple, the last major retailer of
DRM-encumbered music announced, live at MacWorld, that all iTunes
music will be going DRM-free. Today, some 8 million songs and music
videos are already available DRM-free, via iTunes Plus.

Of course, what this really makes clear is that this was never about
the record companies withholding DRM-free music from Apple, but rather
that Apple was unwilling to concede a tiered pricing structure to the
recording companies. So to all those who kept sending us messages
about how Apple were the wrong target, I hope now you will see that
Apple really were forced into this concession.

Take Action with the FSF

Contributions from thousands of individual members enable the FSF's
work. You can contribute by joining at http://www.fsf.org/join. If
you're already a member, you can help refer new members by adding a line with your member number to your email
signature like:

The FSF is also always looking for volunteers
(http://www.fsf.org/volunteer). From rabble-rousing to hacking, from
issue coordination to envelope stuffing -- there's something here for
everybody to do. Also, head over to our campaign section
(http://www.fsf.org/campaigns) and take action on software patents,
DRM, Vista, Opendocument, RIAA and more.